by Gore Vidal
“Before the conventions, I hope.”
Frederika nodded. “Yes, afterwards might be too late … won’t it?”
Timothy was suddenly aware that he had plunged into a world absolutely strange to him. None of this was remotely like the normal dull Washington of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge. Somehow, everything had been dramatically changed by the mysterious cripple in the White House, who fascinated everyone as he spun his webs all round an entire world that was now rapidly converging upon the city in an effort to get his spidery eminence’s attention so that, yet again, the maps of old Europe—and who knew what else of the world?—might be redrawn. As if to dramatize the extent of the sovereign’s range, Frederika introduced Timothy to a pale Chinese who spoke perfect English.
“That was T. V. Soong,” said Frederika, after a ceremonious greeting and departure. “He’s Chiang Kai-shek’s brother-in-law. The Chinese want us to help them fight Japan.” Frederika looked amused. “I wonder if Franklin isn’t biting off a bit more than we can chew.”
“Why chew at all?” Plainly, the whole world was now enfolding the United States in its affairs and not, as so many of Blaise’s guests thought, the other way around. Suddenly, despite the boredom of the Vandenbergs and Tafts—no, not boredom, studied reserve, since no one was about to give away the game whatever it might prove to be—history was beginning to move, if, indeed, it could ever be said to stop. But what was happening now was on a scale unlike anything in the experience of Timothy X. Farrell, creator of Hometown, the first of a series of films about an average American family as it coped, year after year, with a nation in constant flux. Caroline and he had worked, subtly they hoped, to change the way the audience perceived their world. Now President Roosevelt also had some sort of equally imperial vision for a people that, in Timothy’s view, had no such sense of themselves. But then could any country be said to have a character, much less a spontaneous collective plan? Hitler spoke endlessly of a common German destiny that must have sounded to even the dimmest German like one of Wagner’s more unworkable plots.
“You, sir, gave us our best country.” A red-faced man approached Tim.
“Are you a mind-reader?” Tim wondered how this stranger could have, so easily, guessed his thoughts.
“I’m Griffiths.” They shook hands. “Harold Griffiths, the Tribune’s film critic. I’ve seen and studied all your films, including the silents.”
Tim recalled something vaguely unpleasant associated with the name. “Luckily, the great days of Emma Traxler were before my time. I mean, how do you review a film star who is also your publisher? But when the two of you did your last Hometown, and she went home to France, I couldn’t help thinking, had the two of you gone on producing, what an era we might have had.” Griffiths took a glass of whiskey from a waiter’s tray and Tim took one, too: work was done for the night. “I thought you were about to make something of this incoherent country.”
Tim was beginning now to recall a long dull review of his work in a magazine not usually associated with movies—The Atlantic Monthly? He gulped whiskey; burned his throat; experienced a change in mood, for the better. “Yes,” he said, aware that he had missed a flow of words. “Yes,” he repeated, eyes on a pretty middle-aged lady as she escorted a stocky pale-faced man, plainly drunk, to a chair by the library door.
“That’s one of J. P. Morgan’s partners.” Griffiths seemed to know a great deal about subjects unrelated to movies. “He has a weakness, as you can see. But he’s been very active in getting us into the war on the British side.”
The Capitalist, thought Tim; in his head, the word was printed on a title card as in the silent days of film.
“Were you really stopped by the success of the Andy Hardy movies, by Mickey Rooney of all people?”
Tim remembered to smile like Gary Cooper, a thin costive smile. “Let’s say Mr. Mayer’s series about his America was better box-office than mine. The public likes fantasy.”
Tim’s crew were now leaving. He made arrangements to meet them the next day at the Mayflower Hotel. “We’ll be working mostly in the Capitol.” He thanked each of them, remembering even the names of the pickup technicians. They left, but Harold Griffiths did not. He hovered near. Tim usually avoided movie buffs, but here in a city where politicians reigned, he did not altogether mind the attentions of someone who actually knew who Timothy Farrell was.
“Will you make another—I hope you don’t mind me sounding like an eager reporter—of your what-the-people-are-really-like films, or should be like, as my friend Jim Agee wrote in Time.”
Tim recalled a flowery but shrewd description of his work in Time. Since reviews were unsigned in that Jovian magazine, this was the first time that he had heard that there was indeed a writer and not a committee who had written so warmly of the Farrell populist genius.
The drunk businessman was now pulling himself together. The lady was carefully arranging his dark curly hair. Suddenly, he blinked his eyes, and gave her a smile of considerable charm; he was sober now. Fast work, thought Tim, enviously.
“There’s no room right now for one of my pictures. This is the year of fantasy.”
“Do you still think that what you put on the screen can change the way the audience sees itself?”
Tim, who had always hoped that this was true, laughed and lied: “Of course not. Except in a very general way. Anyway, Judge Hardy and Andy are the way Americans want to see themselves.”
Harold Griffiths nodded to show his—disbelief? Tim could not read him, and did not try to. “Would your Hometowners be isolationists today? I mean, if you were making one of your films this minute, what would you show—reflect? About what’s going on in the old hometown?”
“If I were just reflecting, I’d show how indifferent they always are to Europe and its problems. This morning only seven percent want us to go to war against Hitler.”
Which of his interviewees had just told him that? They were beginning to blur in a comfortable bourbon haze. Blaise approached them.
“But then, you don’t just reflect, do you? You try to alter the way people see themselves. That’s why I wrote how your Dust Bowl was better than Grapes of Wrath …”
“Alter? Why, I’m not so vain as all that, Mr. Griffiths.”
But the passionate devotee of film had caught sight of his employer and moved away. Meanwhile, Blaise had paused to say a word or two to the now sober—or apparently sober—Capitalist; then Blaise joined Tim.
“He’s on the board of Fight for Freedom.” Blaise indicated the Capitalist. As a sometime heavy drinker, Tim recognized a fellow “functionary,” as he thought of himself, an alcoholic who still did his work well. Although drunk through most of the shooting of Dust Bowl, he had managed to bring the picture in on time and under budget, and yet, to this day, he had little memory of ever having made it.
Blaise was on his own track now. “Everyone’s choosing up sides. Much too soon from my point of view. The Fighters for Freedom want us to go to war tomorrow to help England and France and I’d rather wait, while you, being Irish, want England to sink beneath the waves.”
Tim laughed. “I don’t know what I think. But certainly not that.”
“This film of yours—the one now—isn’t taking sides?” Blaise betrayed an uncharacteristic anxiety.
“How can I? Each of you says what he thinks and …”
“The rest is up to your Hometown.”
“I don’t think,” said Tim, poignantly aware of how thoroughly he had failed to accomplish his self-appointed mission to recreate his country through lights and shadows on a million screens, “that the Hometowners are ever consulted when it comes to death and taxes.”
“Isn’t that what we’re here for?”
“Maybe what you’re here for.”
Blaise changed the subject. “She’s here, you know. In the town.”
“Who’s here?”
“Your wife.”
“I never married, remember? You mean your ha
lf sister.”
Blaise reddened. “Yes. Caroline arrived two days ago, from France. She asked about you. First thing, actually.”
Tim felt nothing but vague pleasure at the thought of seeing again not so much a onetime mate as a longtime unvaryingly constant, if seldom present, friend. He had not seen Caroline since she had turned over to him her share of the Sanford-Farrell Studio—by then worth nothing—and gone back to France at a time when she was almost alone in predicting that there would be, yet again, a great war; she had also made the point that as she had spent the first German-French war on a movie set, pretending to be a gallant nurse in search of her son in no-man’s-land, she meant, this time, to be home at Saint-Cloud-le-Duc, where, she said delightedly, “the real front is bound to be. I have progressed.”
Blaise took a card from his waistcoat pocket. “Here’s her special number. Don’t lose it. Because if you do, I don’t know how to get hold of another one.”
“Why? Where is she staying?”
“At the White House. Where else? With the Roosevelts, of course.”
2
Caroline looked at her latest face and found it good … enough. Since she had long since killed off her movie star self, the need to worry about her appearance was minimal. Although she had, through sheer will, absolutely forgotten her age—sixty? No. Fifty—she managed to maintain herself so that she could pass for younger, though younger than exactly what was no longer a useful concept or benchmark. The jawline was still as firm as it was in Huns from Hell. She was ageless, she decided, turning away from the dressing-room table and dusty mirror … everything in Eleanor Roosevelt’s White House was dusty, including the Queen’s room, so named for the present British queen, who had slept there the previous June. Eleanor Roosevelt had insisted that Caroline stay with the family. “As long as you like. You cheer up Franklin, and of course I love having you here just down the hall.” Then Eleanor promptly disappeared down a West Virginia coal mine, leaving President Roosevelt to cheer up Caroline, who had come to Washington to transact business with Blaise, never an easy matter.
The Queen’s room occupied the northeast corner of the second floor. In honor of its recent royal occupant, some prints of Queen Victoria were haphazardly hung on the walls. Caroline recognized Eleanor’s absentminded touch. The clock on the mantel was ten minutes slow. Caroline wondered if this was deliberate. The British royal family kept their clocks ahead of time, ten minutes fast, to create anxiety about punctuality. Fortunately, to counteract the misleading White House clocks, a bell always rang to announce the President’s arrival in a particular room. He had been, for some minutes now, in the oval study down the hall from the Queen’s room. This meant that it was seven-fifteen p.m. The sacred cocktail hour when the President would putter about with bottles and shakers and greet whoever happened to be staying in the house as well as the odd guest who might be joining the family for dinner.
Caroline opened the Queen’s-room door to find herself face to face with a Secret Service man in a wrinkled gray suit. He blushed. “Sorry, ma’am.”
“You are on the job, sir.” Caroline stepped around him. As always, she was struck by how small the White House was. The corridor on what Americans called the second floor and she thought of as the first floor ran from west to east. For some unfathomable reason, the east end was higher than the west end and had to be reached by steps. At either end there was a semicircular window that gave surprisingly little light—dusty panes? At the corner of the southwest end, Eleanor had a two-room suite with a view of the Cabinet room and the President’s office as well as, from her bedroom, the sloping South Lawn and, just beyond it, the somewhat pointless obelisk to George Washington, which Eleanor always found, she liked to say in all her wise innocence, deeply comforting.
The President’s bedroom was just up the hall from Eleanor’s suite; connected, however, not with hers but, through a small door, with the oval study across from the Queen’s room. The long dark corridor was decorated with dull paintings of interest only to the inhabiting family, while bookcases of different sizes contained the latest unread product of the nation’s publishers, tribute to the First Reader. The southeast corner contained the Lincoln bedroom, which Franklin said had actually been Lincoln’s office and Cabinet room, now combined into one large and one small bedroom. “There is a ghost, of course,” he had added.
“Lincoln’s?”
“I’ve never seen it. More likely a disappointed office-seeker. They never let you alone, in life or in death.”
“A very proper ghost,” said Caroline, “for such a house.” The President had quoted her twice since. But then he collected phrases and anecdotes to decorate his strategically defensive, as she thought of them, monologues. Or, as Eleanor put it, “It is often so important for Franklin to keep on talking in order not to allow certain people to tell him certain things.”
Caroline liked the oval study best of all the admittedly dismal family rooms. Paintings of the Roosevelt family, of ships, of John Paul Jones hung on the walls. There was a fire in the fireplace and the room smelled of wood smoke and furniture wax that, somehow, kept the heavy Victorian pieces from gleaming. To the left of the fireplace there was a sofa and a curious metal stool on which the President’s legs could be arranged.
Opposite the hall door, the President sat at a table desk, strewn with papers as well as two telephones that had never yet rung, at least when Caroline was in the room. Plainly this was the one place in the house where Franklin was allowed to escape his high office. She still thought of him as the handsome flirtatious young man whom she had known so long ago. But now that he was literally historic, she found no difficulty in addressing him correctly.
“Good evening, Mr. President.” She even felt for an instant that she should curtsy in the awesome presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a figure who towered even when seated in his wheelchair. It was the head and neck that did the trick, she decided, with a professional actor’s eye. The neck was especially thick while the famous head seemed half again larger than the average, its thinning gray hair combed severely back from a high rounded forehead. Roosevelt removed his pince-nez, worn, Eleanor had sighed, as a reminder of his political mentor, President Woodrow Wilson. “We hope Franklin won’t make the same mistakes poor Mr. Wilson did.”
“Such as going to war?” Caroline, like everyone else in the world, wanted to know what the President intended to do about the European war in which, thus far, no gun had been fired. Caroline suspected that no one, including the President, had the slightest notion what was going to happen next. The next move would be, as usual, Hitler’s.
“Caroline!” The resonant voice filled the room as Franklin rolled himself out from behind his desk. She was well used, by now, to the fact that the totally paralyzed legs were like two sticks beneath the extra-thick flannel of trousers calculated to disguise the heavy metal braces that he always wore whenever he knew he would have to be got to his feet in public. Tonight he was not wearing the braces. But then he had always been at home with Caroline since they had first met twenty years earlier when he had been the vigorous athletic assistant secretary of the Navy. She had found him charming if somewhat lightweight and altogether too conscious of the great name he—and Eleanor—together and separately bore. She was President Theodore Roosevelt’s niece; Franklin was merely that president’s fifth cousin. Eleanor and Caroline did enjoy one thing in common: Eleanor Roosevelt Roosevelt had married a cousin as had Caroline Sanford Sanford; only Eleanor’s marriage to Franklin had been a state affair while Caroline’s marriage of mild inconvenience to a dim cousin was the result of her unexpected pregnancy by a handsome married statesman, James Burden Day, now a senator, eager to replace Franklin in the White House next year unless, of course, the master politician were to run for a third term, something no president had ever done before. “Nor will I run,” he had assured Caroline her first evening in the White House, “unless there’s war.…” But, thus far, there was no shooting war, though s
he knew it was coming, and so she carefully answered his questions about the part of France where she lived and the mood of the people, which she described, accurately she thought, as “resigned.”
In order to minimize the effect of his useless legs, the President never used a proper wheelchair. Instead he had taken a plain armless chair to which rollers had been added as well as discreet side wheels which he could turn by hand to get himself about. Since he appeared supremely unconscious of his disability, others ceased to notice it. But there was a great deal of careful stage-managing so that the public would not notice. If he was to be photographed seated, a valet would lift his right leg and decorously cross it over his left. Trouser cuffs were pulled down to touch the tops of his shoes, hiding the ends of the braces. When he “walked,” he would start out of view of the public, his arm through that of an aide or one of his large sons. Then as he stepped into the limelight, head thrown back, the great smile glittering, he would swing first one leg forward, then back as he simultaneously swung the other forward so that he appeared to be walking in a somewhat swaying nautical manner.
Eleanor had confided, “The worst times are at the end of a speech, particularly in the old days. Franklin must hold himself up with both hands on the lectern and still be able to use one of them to turn the pages of his speech, all the while trying to keep his balance on those braces, which are locked just before he starts his walk, which is a terrible effort. Then, when he finishes, we have to get him off the stage—that’s usually fifteen feet to be negotiated. In the old days when we all wore such huge skirts, the ladies would surround him—at least the tall ones like me—and we’d screen him from the audience while two men would then carry him into the wings. That was then, of course. But, even now, with all the Secret Service, it’s still not easy.” Eleanor’s matter-of-factness always charmed Caroline, who would have been tempted to dramatize the situation had she been an actor in so extraordinary a script. Nevertheless, there was sufficient drama in the fact that although there must be numerous photographs of the President caught off-guard in his rolling chair, none had ever appeared in an American newspaper. Why? she wondered. Instinctive self-preservation? In a world where dictators strode and strutted toward war, Americans instinctively did not want to publicize the fact that their own leader could not even walk.